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maracas

nounB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,514 of 15,258neutral

Maracas are a pair of shakers filled with seeds or beads. Shake the maracas, a pair of maracas, play maracas.

They are played in pairs and always slightly out of unison, since the point is a wash of sound rather than a single hit. The word is from a South American language and came into English through Spanish.

Axel Heymann · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of maracas

  1. 1nounmaracasA pair of shakers filled with seeds or beads.B2+

    “The children danced around the room shaking maracas and banging drums.”

maracas is an instrument.

Where it comes from

  1. gug

    mbaraka — rattle

  2. tpw

    maraká

  3. pt-BR

    maraca

  4. English

    maraca

  5. English, today

    maracas

maraca comes from pt-BR maraca, derived from tpw maraká or gug mbaraka (“rattle”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Music & Instruments

Practise this word

maracas in the wild

  • The instruments used are the cuatro, maracas and drums.

    Aguinaldo (music)

  • As Hinako Hiiragi in anime Chitose Get You!! she plays maracas again, in the ending theme.

    Mako (voice actress)

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.